In the months before 9/11, thousands of
American citizens were inadvertently swept up in wiretaps, had their emails
monitored, and were being watched as they surfed the Internet by spies at
the super-secret National Security Agency, former NSA and counterterrorism
officials said.

The NSA, with full knowledge of the White House, crossed
the line from routine surveillance of foreigners and suspected terrorists
into illegal activity by continuing to monitor the international telephone
calls and emails of Americans without a court order. The NSA unintentionally
intercepts Americans' phone calls and emails if the agency's computers zero
in on a specific keyword used in the communication. But once the NSA figures
out that they are listening in on an American, the eavesdropping is supposed
to immediately end, and the identity of the individual is supposed to be
deleted. While the agency did follow protocol, there were instances when
the NSA was instructed to keep tabs on certain individuals that became of
interest to some officials in the White House.

What sets this type of operation apart from the unprecedented
covert domestic spying activities the NSA had been conducting after 9/11
is a top secret executive order signed by President Bush in 2002 authorizing
the NSA to target specific American citizens. Prior to 9/11, American citizens
were the subject of non-specific surveillance by the NSA that was condoned
and approved by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, according to former NSA and counterterrorism
officials.

The sources, who requested anonymity because they were
instructed not to talk about NSA activities, but who hope they can testify
before Congress about the domestic spying, said that, in December 2000,
the NSA completed a report for the incoming administration, titled "Transition
2001," which explained, among other things, how the NSA would improve
its intelligence gathering capabilities by hiring additional personnel.

Moreover, in a warning to the incoming administration,
the agency said that in its quest to compete on a technological level with
terrorists who have access to state-of-the-art equipment, some American
citizens would get caught up in the NSA's surveillance activities. However,
in those instances, the identities of the Americans who made telephone calls
overseas would be "minimized," one former NSA official said, in
order to conceal the identity of the American citizen picked up on a wiretap.

"What we're supposed to do is delete the name
of the person," said the former NSA official, who worked as an encryption
specialist.

The former official said that even during the Clinton
administration, the NSA would inadvertently obtain the identities of Americans
citizens in its wiretaps as a result of certain keywords, like bomb or jihad,
NSA computers are programmed to identify. When the NSA prepares its reports
and transcripts of the conversations, the names of Americans are supposed
to be immediately destroyed.

By law, the NSA is prohibited from spying on a United
States citizen, a US corporation or an immigrant who is in this country
on permanent residence. With permission from a special court, the NSA can
eavesdrop on diplomats and foreigners inside the US.

"If, in the course of surveillance, NSA analysts
learn that it involves a US citizen or company, they are dumping that information
right then and there," an unnamed official told the Boston Globe in
a story published October 27, 2001.

But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the
NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President
Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by
Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies,
including the CIA and NSA.

"Given Cheney's background on national security
going back to the Ford years, his time on the House Intelligence Committee,
and as secretary of defense, Bush said at the top of his list of things
he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence," Woodward wrote in his book
about the buildup to the Iraq war. "In the first months of the new
administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies -- the
CIA, the National Security Agency, which intercepted communications, and
the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "

It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous
requests from Cheney and other officials in the State and Defense departments
to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence
reports, so administration officials could better understand the context
of the intelligence.

Separately, at this time, Cheney was working with intelligence
agencies, including the NSA, to develop a large-scale emergency plan to
deal with any biological, chemical or nuclear attack on US soil.

Requesting that the NSA reveal the identity of Americans
caught in wiretaps is legal as long as it serves the purpose of understanding
the context of the intelligence information.

But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney
would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to
continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought
more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal
territory.

Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up
in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked
on counterterrorism related issues.

"What's really disturbing is that some of those
people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the
White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official
said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the
vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the
threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued
his interest. I just don't know."

An NSA spokesperson would not comment for this story.
Because of the level of secrecy at the agency, it's impossible to ascertain
for the record how far the agency has gone in its domestic surveillance.

James Bamford, the author of the best-selling books
The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, which blew the door wide open by
first revealing the NSA's covert activities, said he doesn't believe terrorism
was a priority for the administration before 9/11 and he doesn't think the
agency targeted specific Americans as it is doing now.

"I looked into that theory," Bamford said
in an interview. "And I was assured that domestic surveillance was
a black area the NSA stayed away from before 9/11.

"The NSA was sort of a side agency before 9/11.
At that point they were looking for a mission. Terrorism was not a big priority.
[American] names may have been picked up but I was told they dropped them
immediately after. That's the procedure."

But Bamford said it's possible the NSA may have conducted
the type of spying prior to 9/11 that the former NSA officials described.
"It's hard to tell" if that happened, Bamford said. "It's
a very secret agency."

In the summer of 2001, the NSA spent millions of dollars
on a publicity campaign to repair its public image by taking the unprecedented
step of opening up its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland to reporters,
to dispel the myth that the NSA was spying on Americans.

In a July 10, 2001, segment on "Nightline,"
host Chris Bury reported that "privacy advocates in the United States
and Europe are raising new questions about whether innocent civilians get
caught up in the NSA's electronic web."

Then-NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who was
interviewed by "Nightline," said it was absolutely untrue that
the agency was monitoring Americans who are suspected of being agents of
a foreign power without first seeking a special warrant from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"We don't do anything willy-nilly," Hayden
said. "We're a foreign intelligence agency. We try to collect information
that is of value to American decision-makers, to protect American values,
America -- and American lives. To suggest that we're out there, on our own,
renegade, pulling in random communications, is -- is simply wrong. So everything
we do is for a targeted foreign intelligence purpose. With regard to the
-- the question of industrial espionage, no. Period. Dot. We don't do that."

But, when asked "How do we know that the fox isn't
guarding the chicken coop?" Hayden responded by saying that Americans
should trust the employees of the NSA.

"They deserve your trust, but you don't have to
trust them," Hayden said. "We aren't off the leash, so to speak,
guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch,
in the Department of Defense, in the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, which is comprised of both government and nongovernmental officials.
You've got both houses of Congress with -- with very active -- in some cases,
aggressive -- intelligence oversight committees with staff members who have
an access badge to NSA just like mine."

One former NSA official said in response to Hayden's
2001 interview, "What do you expect him to say? He's got to deny it.
I agree. We weren't targeting specific people, which is what the president's
executive order does. However, we did keep tabs on some Americans we caught
if there was an interest" by the White House. "That's not legal.
And I am very upset that I played a part in it."

James Risen, the New York Times reporter credited with
exposing the NSA's covert domestic surveillance activities that came as
a result of a secret executive order President Bush issued in 2002, wrote
in his just-published book, State of War, that the administration was very
aggressive in its intelligence gathering activities before 9/11. However,
Risen does not say that means the administration permitted the NSA to spy
on Americans.

"It is now clear that the White House went through
the motions of the public debate over the (2001) Patriot Act, all the while
knowing that the intelligence community was secretly conducting a far more
aggressive domestic surveillance campaign," Risen wrote in State of
War.

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